The Threshing Machine Dad Rebuilt

The Sign

That afternoon, after the show threshing, I went back to Dad’s machine to put the belt away.

Somebody had taken down the entry card with Grady’s name on it. In its place there was a new sign, a piece of white board painted by hand and wired to the side of the machine. Wendell does all the show’s signs. I know his lettering.

It said Restored by Arlis Bontrager.

Dad was standing in front of it with Lorenz. Neither of them said anything for a while.

“Wendell,” Dad called finally. Wendell was walking by with a box of programs. “You got any more of that board?”

“Some.”

“Make me another one,” Dad said. “Smaller. To go under this one.”

Wendell looked at him. “Saying what?”

Dad told him.

Wendell grinned, and went off toward his workshop behind the show office, and came back an hour later with paint still tacky on it. He wired it on under the first one, a little crooked, and stepped back.

Grady came by near suppertime with Rhoda, his hands wrapped in gauze from the blisters. He stopped and read the signs. He stood there a long time.

He did not say anything. He just reached up and straightened the little one so it hung even with the big one.

Then he went and got his trailer and started chaining down the machine to take it home.

The Landing

I drove the Farmall home that evening, with Dad right behind me in his pickup. The sun was going down orange behind us again, and the dust hung over the gravel. I pulled into his yard and shut her down by the shed door, and he got out of the pickup with his straw hat in his hand like before.

His hands were still. I looked twice to be sure.

“You knew I’d come that morning,” I said. “You were already in the shed.”

“I figured,” he said.

We stood a while.

“Grandpa’d have liked it,” he said. “The red’s right. I knew it was.”

“It was right,” I said.

He nodded and looked out over the beans going gold, and that was all we said. It was enough. It always has been, with him.

The machine sits in Dad’s shed now with a tarp over it, waiting for next Labor Day. Grady says he will haul it again. Lorenz says he plans to be there to pitch, and nobody argues with him.

When you lift the tarp, the first thing you see is the sign. It says Restored by Arlis Bontrager, and a smaller one under it says Bundles by Grady.